If you feel like registering a gentle complaint about the current leadership, you could do worse than "Signature Move," a lesbian dramedy about the maybe-sort-of-something between a Pakistani-American immigration lawyer and a Mexican-American bookstore clerk.

Zaynab (co-writer/co-producer Fawzia Mirza) meets Alma (Sari Sanchez) at a friendly bar; they drink, dance, and fall into bed. The proudly out Alma would like the fling to become something more. Zaynab, fairly tightly closeted, isnâ€™t sure; she keeps her sexuality from her recently widowed mother (Shabana Azmi), who spends her days sitting in Zaynabâ€™s apartment, watching Pakistani soap operas and spying on passersby with her binoculars.

The script, by Mirza and Lisa Donato, is neatly assembled. The soap operas (Alma speaks in praise of telenovelas too) as well as a seemingly discordant note â€” female lucha libre wrestling â€” form part of the movieâ€™s theme about acting, pretending, lying. Itâ€™s maybe a little too much of a coincidence that Zaynab takes wrestling lessons from a client (as payment for Zaynabâ€™s legal services) and then meets and beds the daughter of a once-famed, now-retired luchadora. But I didnâ€™t mind, because metaphorically itâ€™s sound â€” the universe is conspiring to show Zaynab in ways painfully emotional and physical that she has to stop acting.

Director Jennifer Reeder, an indie-film veteran, keeps Signature Move bubbling atop a low flame, occasionally turning up the heat when the lovers enjoy each other (always clothed â€” save for a couple of words, this could be a PG film). Itâ€™s assured work from a filmmaker who values human-scaled awkward comedy over grand passion; the movie itself could have been handled as a soap opera, but Reeder disdains cheese (this is most welcome during the climax, at a lucha libre event). The women are agreeably paired: the warm and fleshy Sanchez matches up amusingly with the angular, neurotic Mirza, whose short swept-up hair and stoic default expression give her a resemblance to the young, imperious Camille Paglia.

One odd running motif is the concept of a human being â€ścoming out ofâ€ť another human, the unlikely link mothers and daughters have despite deceiving looks. It also neatly sums up the dichotomous feeling many modern LGBT folks have when trying to reconcile their heritage with their sexuality. Sooner or later Zaynab has to move on past her mother, and so on. Signature Move packs a lot under a relatively small hood; the film weighs in at a slender hour and fifteen minutes, and sometimes feels like an extended pilot for a Pakistani-American lesbian New Girl. Join Zaynab, her girlfriend Alma, and their zany friends and family every week on NBC! Certainly there are worse things to say of a film than that weâ€™d gladly spend more hours with its characters.

Thatâ€™s probably more a result of the charm of the actors (I especially liked Audrey Francis as Zaynabâ€™s wrestling coach, sort of an Illeana Douglas with biceps) than a reflection of the filmmakersâ€™ goals here. Signature Move is short, but sticks around exactly as long as it needs to in order to make its point about the courage of declaring oneself (or oneâ€™s self). The abbreviated length also means we donâ€™t have to wallow in the loversâ€™ temporary misery for very long.

The movie is a perfectly pleasant bonbon for its target audience and its allies, and likely poison to those who donâ€™t care for Pakistanis, Mexicans, gays, or women.